Nils Pickert's blog ^pro

I hope at least. After only 5 weeks my phone company will manage to connect my new flat to the world. I assume that they are digging out the cable from my old flat and re-route it through all of the city to the new flat. I expect the excavators to arrive any day now...

Exactly 40 years ago it took men about 5 days to get to the moon. 2000 years ago a guy managed to get 10.000s of soldiers and a couple of war elephants to cross the alps in some weeks. Just for comparison. So far on 21st century...

I won't make it to Bologna. I would have liked to see you all there, but time and money are quite short after moving to a new flat... (and also I should get some stuff done at work, after two weeks of not being at work and two weeks spent in meetings).

Have fun

I'll be offline for most of the following weeks (or at least not uploading pictures). Might take some time till I get back again, but I'll return (or I'll be bawck as the governator would say...)

Probably not Johnny Depp

Scene 54 wasn't in. Neither could you see me in the movie. And it wasn't exactly a good movie.

Especially annoying was the "I was there"-style of waving the camera around like a holiday video of the 80ies. But nice cars and it wasn't a bad movie either.

This is supposed to be the 21st century. We should have jet packs, flying cars, monorails and gigantic zeppelins. People should have colonised the moon, we should have huge cities at the bottom of the ocean. That's what they promised us in the pop-sci books in the 60s...

So, WHY THE HECK IT STILL TAKES THREE WEEKS TO GET A NEW PHONE? First I had to change the tariff from an old contract to a new company contract, supposed to take two days, in reality taking two weeks. For a simple change in one field in a database or something. Then I was supposed to go to the shop and get the phone. At least that was the theory. In reality, the guy at the shop, who looked exactly like Paul Potts but didn't sing, stared about half an hour into his computer and then said that it's not in his system and he needs to send a FAX and it's not as easy as he liked. This fax will be processed some day or other, usually it's one or two business days. Then they send me the phone by mail, which is usually another two business days. And then I have to activate it and one day, hopefully still this year I have a new phone...

Any questions why the economy is braking down?

faz hoje 35 anos. A pergunta é que fica...

A pergunta é se alguem tem coragem de ter ideas, se alguem tem coragem de mudar coisas...

died 25 years ago today. Just in case you wanted to know...

This is the motto of the Tweed Cycling Club. And a perfectly fine one too.

Following that theme, I'll be at the Retro Classics in Stuttgart, at the booth of the Audi Club International, to represent the DKW Club Nürnberg-Fürth. My DKW will be there as well. Just drop me a message if you plan to go there too, so that we can arrange a meet-up :-)

... um es mit Brecht zu sagen. Meine EOS300D hat vorgestern den Geist aufgegeben und will den Verschluss nicht mehr auf machen. Ich habe sie zwar gerade zum Fotoladen gebracht und lasse einen Kostenvoranschlag zur Reparatur machen, aber ich nehme mal an dass sich das nicht mehr lohnt.

Stellt sich die Frage EOS40D oder 50D (Canon bleibt's weil ich bereits ein kleines Vermögen in Linsen gesteckt habe und die nicht verkaufen will). Genauer: sind mir die wenigen neuen Features 300€ wert...

Mal eine Woche drüber schlafen und hoffen, dass mein Konto bis dahin nicht ganz leer ist (wenn die Firma es schafft, die Reisekosten zu überweisen bevor die Kreditkarte zuschlägt).

If you tend to like austrian-turkish swing-balkan-dub, listen to the Fatima Spar and the Freedom Fries.

Looks like Vienna is the new Berlin :-)

Two nice articles by Bruce Sterling and his alter ego Bruno Argento.

After 1989 we enjoyed a strange interregnum where "history ended." Everyone ran up a credit-card bill at the global supermarket. The adventure ended badly, in crisis. Still, let us be of good heart. In cold fact, a financial crisis is one of the kindest and mildest sorts of crisis a civilization can have. Compared to typical Italian catastrophes like wars, epidemics, earthquakes, volcanoes, endemic political collapse — a financial crisis is a problem for schoolchildren.

Some time ago I got asked, if one of my pictures can be used in a UN report on Aids/HIV in the caribbean. Of course I agreed. It's now published and available on the web. (My picture is the one above the executive summary).

It's nice to see that something done by me ends up in something of real importance.

Kiss Kiss Bang Bangalore (The Simpsons)

I'll be in Bangalore next week, hopefully you'll see some pictures (if I have time outside the office...)

sab hat eine schöne Zusammenfassung zum Internetfilter unserer weisen Familienministerin Ursula-"Ich-habe-siebzehn-Kinder"-von-der-Leyen: www.ipernity.com/blog/36201/122573

I am currently cleaning my photo collection (deleting duplicates, doing some better tagging etc.) and merge everything from f-spot to Lightroom [1]. When I am stumbling upon pictures I haven't put here already, I will upload them :-)

So expect random pictures...

[1] Lightroom and Photoshop are better than f-spot and gimp. Definitely. Slightly more expensive though... (I got the student version, which is more affordable but still painfully expensive)

Maybe somebody is interested in how I treat my pictures...:

Info: My camera time setting is UTC, I use Linux and mainly shoot RAW. Pictures are stored on a NAS mounted as ~/Photos/ (well, symlinked, but that's a detail)

1 Import Pictures with f-spot from CF card. f-spot currently sucks and changes the time to UTC (it assumes that your camera runs on the same time-zone as your computer, and it completely ignores possible changes due to DST). So I run the shift date and time extension to get everything back to a sane state. Fortunately f-spot cannot write metadata to RAW files, so everything there stays untouched. Add tags, go over the images and rate with 1 to 5 stars. Only pictures with 4 or 5 stars are developped, pictures which have technical defects (defocussed, shaken etc) are deleted immedeately.

2 Geotag images with geotag. Geotag writes the Metadata to an xmp file, as it also cannot write to raw files. This is not started from f-spot, I run it completely stand-alone. I have a gps-track for each day, pictures for which I do not have gps info are either left alone or if I have the time geotagged with Google Maps/Earth (using geotag)

3 Develop pictures with ufraw from f-spot. I use the newest ubuntu packages from pmjdebruin. I use sometimes color profiles for a EOS10 or EOS400, sometimes no color profile. Whatever looks better... On the long run, I'd like to make a color profile for my camera, but I need a profile template which costs a fortune.

4 Additional image treatment with the Gimp, like B&W conversion. There are some nice plugins which simulate B&W film. Rotation I sometimes correct in f-spot, but most other stuff like vignetting etc I do in gimp. Pictures I want to upload now get the tag "To Ipernity"

5 Fix the metadata of the images using exiftool. As f-spot messes up the time and the geo-info from the xmp files is ignored for now, I copy all tags from the raw-file and all tags from the xmp file to the jpgs. I also add copyright and author information with the script below:

#!/bin/bash
set -e
ext=.CRW

find . -type f -name "*${ext}" | while read i; do 
	# Get basename of file for easier treatment
	bn=`basename $i $ext` ;	
	find . -type f -name "${bn}*.jpg" | while read j; do
		echo "Fixing $j";
		exiftool -TagsFromFile "${i}" "${j}";
		# check if there is an xmp file (eg generated by geotag program)
		if [ -e ${bn}.xmp ]; then 
			exiftool -TagsFromFile "${bn}.xmp" "${j}"
		fi;
		# Add Copyright and Author Info
		exiftool -Author="Nils Pickert" \
		-OwnerName="Nils Pickert" \
                -UserComment="(c) 2008 Nils Pickert, all rights reserved" "${j}";
	 done;
done

6 Export all pictures which I want to upload in a batch to a temporary folder (with the f-spot extension "export to folder"). Then use iperUpload to set titles and tags and upload everything.

What I want to change soon in this workflow:

• I hope that f-.spot gets the time handling correct soon, so I do not need to mess around there anymore
• Adding a steganographic watermark would be nice
• Get a Mac and Lightroom to keep my mental sanity as this right now is overly complicated

I am in no way affiliated with this, but it looks like a good idea. According to Make Blog: "think: Amazon meets eBay at a craft's fair". Have a look at etsy

You'll need to wait a bit till I'll catch up with the Barcelona pictures. I am still working on the pictures from Croatia four weeks ago... Taking photos in raw-mode has some advantages, but the work you have with them is definitely not one of them. But I still think it's worth it. And back in the black and white days developing was also a lot of fun, the only thing missing now is sitting in the dark and messing around with toxic fluids.